I Won't Forgive What You Did (26 page)

I rushed home, blinded by tears. I couldn’t bear to think what all the neighbours now thought of me, having heard all the foul things my own father had called me. I arrived home feeling I didn’t have anyone anywhere to turn and, in desperation, I telephoned Gary.

He immediately calmed me and made me feel better and then suggested that the best thing would be for him to take me away for a couple of days. My older sister offered to have Alfie and Jennifer for the weekend and we went to stay with Gary’s aunt in Herefordshire.

It was there, once again, that my life turned on a moment that would haunt me for ever. Once again I found myself making a life-changing decision based on the deeply troubled relationship I had with my mother.

When Gary asked me to marry him – which he did almost as soon as we arrived – I instantly decided to say yes. Not because I loved him – I didn’t even like him – and not because I felt grateful either. I mostly did it because in the very instant he asked I recalled that when I’d first told my mother I was going to meet him she had declared him (having already met him, through my brother) to be ‘a bit of all right’. I felt the same sort of inexplicable rage about that now, as I had when I’d seen Joe on the arm of a girl who had reminded me so much of her.

Years later, it remains no less inexplicable. I still have no understanding of why I did it, other than to recall that my anger was immense, and made me hate her so very, very much. Perhaps it was just one of the few ways I could get back at her for my childhood. Looking back, perhaps the rage was more to do with my feelings about how useless she’d always been; just blind anger about how I felt she’d failed me. Yet I didn’t get back at her by acting as I did, did I? On the contrary. I just harmed myself and my children.

‘And let’s do it quickly’ I added as, even as I nodded, I knew that if I had any time to think about it, the wedding would never take place. And it did have to take place. I didn’t want to be with such an ugly, mean-spirited person, but I also knew it was possibly the only way out of the abyss I was falling into. He would take control. He would sort my life out and all would be well.

When we got home, I immediately got in touch with Malcolm and told him our relationship was over. Doing so distressed me greatly, and also made him incredulous and, I heard later, terribly upset. Had I any idea then of how much he apparently cared for me, would my life have panned out completely differently? Perhaps if I had realized – not been so convinced of my worthlessness – I could have told him how I
really
felt about him. But I was too far out – drowning in the sea of my self-loathing about the mess I was in. Being with Gary – so controlling, so ugly, both inside and outside – was what I was used to, what I knew; which made me feel safer. At no point was this conscious – it was just instinctive and unthinking. All I knew was that around Malcolm, I felt so vulnerable, but with Gary I felt nothing. How sad to know now that my anxiety around Malcolm was just love manifesting itself – was
normal.
Whereas what I felt with Gary – his emotionlessness, the deadness between us – was not normal at all. But what it
was
was the mirror of my emotionally void childhood, which is why it
felt
normal to me.

If ever a person was given opportunities to reflect on the folly of their decision, it was me. Right away, the wedding plans made Gary irritable. While the family endorsed my decision (I was doing ‘the right thing’, I was ‘doing what was best’, how lucky it was that I had ‘seen sense’, and agreed to be with someone who so ‘graciously’ was going to ‘take on’ me and the children’) I was increasingly aware of his annoyance. He knew I had no money, but he still couldn’t help reminding me. He was angry about having to dip into his savings, particularly when I asked if I could perhaps have a little cash to buy Jennifer a dress. ‘Why can’t you buy it yourself?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s
your
money? What contribution are
you
making?’

But what could I say? Nothing. All I could do was reflect on how unfathomable it was that the man who would vow soon that he would cherish me, thought so little of me that he didn’t care about how I or my children looked or felt.

In the small hours, I’d panic. But in the daytime, with everyone around me reminding me of my luck, I just accepted that I was a burden on everyone and that having me married off again would address that. It’s the right thing, my mother kept reminding me. The right thing to do in your circumstances. And perhaps she was right. My circumstances hadn’t really altered. I was still that same woeful Wednesday’s child I’d been born. A useless waste of space and a failure.

Energized, my mother started arranging the reception.

I spent the morning of my second wedding, just as I had my first: sitting on my mother’s filthy kitchen floor, crying. How ironic. Because all I could think about was Joe. How if Joe hadn’t left us, I wouldn’t have to do this. How we’d still be a happy family. How if Joe hadn’t left us, poor little Alfie would be well.

‘It’s for the best,’ everyone kept saying, and I believed them. It
was
for the best. I
knew
that. I did. But it didn’t make me feel any less heartbroken.

I had a simple cream dress, with little brown flowers on it, and when my brother and his wife arrived they gave me a handful of carnations to hold during the photos, which were gathered together in a piece of foil. Once again I spent both the service and the reception in a daze, unable to believe what was happening. What was wrong with me, I thought, that I had to settle for this terrifying, cold man?

Yet settle I must. How could I pass up this one chance for my children? How could I let this go knowing the alternative was just a big, terrifying void? I truly believed I was just a piece of rubbish, my heart was broken, and I felt like the whore my father had called me. Who else would want me? I really felt Gary was the only thing that stood between me and some terrible end.

I woke the next morning, after a sleepless night, and felt I could hardly bear being in the house with Gary, let alone accept that I was married to him. He had gone through the service like an automaton himself, and I wondered if he felt as horrified as I did. For me, it was like having a complete stranger move in, but how did he feel about it? I realized we never ever talked – about anything – and that I didn’t know him at all. Why had he married me? Was it just because I was so much younger than him? Was it the idea of having someone young and sexy on his arm? The one thing I’d come to learn about Gary was that sex was a huge part of his life. And not in a healthy way.

He behaved inappropriately, be it around women, who he was always chatting up, or around men, when he sometimes told filthy jokes. Yet, at the same time, he had this guilty air as though he was ashamed of himself, and acted as if he expected his mother to appear, and tell him off, like a naughty little boy.

Perhaps I recognized something horribly familiar in Gary – I didn’t know. What I
did
know was that the four walls of my house were closing in. Needing to get out, and it being such a balmy September day, I suggested we take the children to the beach. I felt so sorry for them, and so guilty that they were stuck in all this.

It was only a short drive to the nearest seaside town and we soon arrived and drove into the multi-storey car park. It was here, less than twenty-four hours after I had married Gary, that I saw something that made me understand, chillingly, what a terrible mistake I’d made.

We'd got out of the car, gathered our beach things, and set off to the exit and stairs. I was walking ahead with Jennifer, helping her negotiate the steps, and happened to turn around to check that the others were behind us. What I saw made my blood run cold.

Gary had Alfie’s ear twisted between his thumb and fore-finger, and was banging his head against the brick wall. He was leaning over him as he did so, saying something I couldn’t catch.

My stomach felt as if it had plummeted to the floor, to be replaced by a rising wave of horror. What was Gary doing to him?

I tried to shout but no sound came out. And, at that moment, Gary looked up and saw me. He immediately let go of Alfie’s ear and smiled.

‘What were you doing?’ I asked, my voice wobbly.

‘Nothing,’ he answered. I walked back towards them. ‘Yes, you were,’ I said. ‘I just saw you.’

Gary shook his head. ‘No I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘You’re mistaken.’ He turned to Alfie, placing a hand on his shoulder and smiling again. ‘We’re all right, aren’t we, Alfie?’

He laughed then, passed by me, and we all carried on walking, Alfie completely silent, looking scared.

As I sat on the beach watching them both play cricket, I began to question myself about what I’d seen. Alfie looked fine now, and Gary was throwing the ball for him, and it was a lovely day, and . . . well, had I got it all wrong?

No, I hadn’t. I knew exactly what I’d seen, but even as I thought that, I thought something else too. I could hear a familiar voice inside me, one that was always louder than any other. The one that kept saying, ‘Who’d believe you, anyway?’

‘Gary wouldn’t do that,’ everyone would say ‘You must be making it all up’; ‘Gary is a good person’; ‘Gary agreed to marry you’; ‘Gary has heroically taken on your children’. Oh, God, I thought, sitting on the shingle with Jennifer, watching her throwing pebbles into the sea. I really
had
made the biggest mistake of my life, and now I was trapped. I could already hear everyone clamouring to blame me, just as they’d done when Joe had left me. ‘Such a nice bloke,’ they’d said. ‘I liked Joe – such a shame.’ ‘Is there nothing you can do? Isn’t there anything you could change?’ ‘You used to shout at him sometimes – admit it. You can’t really blame him for leaving, can you?’

I watched Gary now, looking every inch the kind stepfather, and I knew I had messed up our lives. How could he just blithely
do
that to Alfie? The bastard. I hated him. Yet how could I escape? Where would I find the money? The courage? The wherewithal? I had nowhere to go and no one to go to, and the alternative – being alone with the children – was unthinkable. I really believed they were not safe with me alone. That I had to stick this out so that my children could be safe. Only then, when they were grown up, and safely away from me, could I run away from this terrifying man.

I saw all this so clearly, on the beach, that autumn day. I wanted to scream and cry, shout out my pain to the heavens, but I knew I mustn’t do that. I must keep my head.

I tried very hard to get on with being Gary’s wife, but it was hard. He was such a cold man. And also frightening. Unlike my father, who was like a volcano that could blow at any moment, Gary was ice cold – like someone who was already dead.

Our marriage very quickly became one of extremes. Around people, Gary played the part he had always played, carefully editing his words and behaviour around me and the children so as not to expose his coldness and cruelty. At home, by contrast, we lived this strange, barren coexistence, punctuated only by frequent rows. I always felt physically afraid of him, just as I had my father, and it wasn’t long before he confirmed my fear as rational. When I once spoke about his mother hitting him with washing tongs when he was small (something he had mentioned to me early on in our relationship) he grabbed me so hard around the throat with one hand that he was able to twist and throw me down on the bed. He then kneeled beside me, his hand still clasped tight around my throat and said, in a quiet but incredibly threatening voice, ‘Don’t you
ever
mention my mother again. She was the salt of the earth, do you hear?’

He then added that she only hit him – and on the most painful place she
could
hit – so that he’d know how to behave. Which he patently did in public, but, I remember wondering, even as he was drumming this point home, what she’d have thought if she could see her son now.

It was one of the few things Gary ever told me about his childhood, but it was enough to make me even more wary. It certainly explained the coldness and cruelty of which he was capable. I had terrible nightmares throughout the whole of our marriage – of men in visors and armour whose faces I couldn’t see, clutching guns, out to shoot and kill me.

Outside the house, I felt safer. So I threw myself into getting involved in village matters and found I was good at, and enjoyed, fund-raising. I also had a talent for putting on events, and both wrote and directed a well-received pantomime, based on characters in the village, that all the locals, including children, starred in.

I learned later that most had given our marriage six months, me being so patently not good enough. Behind closed doors, however, things were different and though the children wouldn’t actually say he was unkind to them until years later, Alfie’s behaviour was becoming a cause for concern. He would tease his sister and be generally disruptive and unhappy, both at home and school. At the time I thought this was because he was sad about his daddy, and the fact that Joe didn’t bother with him. But I later found out that when I was away working (which by now I was, often, as I had work as a peripatetic care assistant for residential homes) both children were terrified of Gary, and would keep out of his way. Indeed, he apparently often threatened to assault Alfie, and though less physically aggressive around Jennifer, acted in other ways that made her feel very uncomfortable.

Yet again, however, I failed to take heed of what stared me in the face.